Published by Riverhead Books, 2010
Available from Amazon.com and other booksellers

The most
valuable aspect of Practical Wisdom is that it demonstrates how
to apply practical wisdom, as first spelled out by Aristotle, to life
today, particularly in the USA, where discontent with our institutions
has become so widespread. The authors are a psychologist (Barry Schwartz)
and a political scientist (Kenneth Sharpe). With recent events like
our financial crisis in mind, they indicate that while new rules and
incentives may well be needed to reform our institutions, such changes
alone will not be sufficient and indeed are sometimes counterproductive.
Too many rules and incentives can inhibit and skew the development of
practical wisdom, both in individuals and in institutions. And practical
wisdom for the authors is the “master virtue” or maestro of our other
virtues (p. 280).

Rather than providing a concise
definition of practical wisdom, the authors describe it. Basically, it involves
making good choices in our everyday lives, whether at work, with our friends,
or in raising our children. Such wisdom relies on both proper aims and proper
skills, and combines feeling with thinking. While this book recognizes the
importance of many of the wisdom values that other scholars have recognized,
such as empathy, detachment, and truth, it emphasizes the importance of
developing good judgment as to how to balance and prioritize them. And it
provides numerous examples, especially from fields like medicine, law,
education, and business. How does a doctor balance empathy with detachment; a
judge, mercy with justice; a teacher, compassion with objective grading; or a
banker, making money with the welfare of his customers? In dealing with such
choices the authors provide numerous interesting cases, usually taken from real
life.

Practical Wisdom quotes
a former dean of Harvard Law School, who wrote, “The term [profession] refers
to a group . . . pursuing a learned art as a common calling in the spirit of
public service--no less a public service because it may incidentally be a means
of livelihood. Pursuit of the learned art in the spirit of a public service is
the primary purpose” (p. 212). The authors clearly believe that doctors,
lawyers, teachers, and even bankers, should aim first at public service, not
making money. Just as importantly, administrators, organizations (like the AMA
or NEA) and educational institutions that organize and prepare professionals
should help inculcate such an ethic into their professions. Hospital administrators,
for example, should attempt to create a culture at their hospitals that puts
patient care, not profit, first.

But the authors realize that
the current trend is towards more bureaucratization, specialization,
standardization, and emphasis on moneymaking, all of which help bring about
more rules and incentives. Although the authors are not conservatives railing
away at big government or suggesting that the powers of corporations should be
unrestrained, they do relate various incidents where rules and incentives got
in the way of practical wisdom and even common sense.

Ironically, some of these
rules, for example in regard to mandating minimum sentences for various crimes,
were pushed for by conservatives who distrusted “liberal judges,” whom they
thought were “soft on crime.” But an excessive faith in more laws and
incentives cuts across political boundaries.

Among the many unwise
applications of laws was the case of a man who took his seven-year-old son to a
Detroit Tiger baseball game and bought him lemonade that unbeknownst to the
father contained a small account of alcohol. A security guard noticed the boy
drinking the lemonade, and with the aid of the police the boy was rushed by
ambulance to a hospital, where doctors discovered no measurable trace of
alcohol in his system. The boy was then put in a foster home for three days
before a judge ruled that he could go home—but only to his mother. The father
was not allowed back home until two weeks had passed. At various stages of this
bureaucratic nightmare officials claimed they were just following rules. (This
and some other “case studies” are also mentioned by Schwartz in an enlightening
video lecture, a link to which is featured on the Wisdom Page.)

Prior to the Supreme Court’s
decision in United States v. Booker (2005), which ruled that legislation
had exceeded the constitutional prerogatives of Congress to limit judicial
discretion, there were numerous cases of judges who were thwarted in their
attempts to exercise practical wisdom by balancing retribution, deterrence, and
rehabilitation.

Then there was the case of a
Texas school teacher who was advised by an outside consultant how best to
prepare her students to pass standardized state tests that had become
increasingly important in measuring schools’ progress. The advice boiled down
to basically concentrating her attention on those whose success on the test
could go either way. Why, after all, exert much energy on those who would
probably pass or fail regardless of how much time the teacher spent with them?

Such an emphasis on measurable
performance results often flew in the face of more humanistic practical wisdom
goals, and the authors make a useful distinction between performance goals and
masterly goals. In the first, students aim at doing well on tests and getting
good grades, but in the second case they stress learning more, working toward
mastering a subject. One of the problems with incentives is that they often
reward achieving the first type of goals, not the second. Such was the case
with the girl who in order to be rewarded for reading the most books in her
class started picking books on the basis of their brevity and large print,
rather than any intrinsic interest they had for her.

In light of our country’s
on-going debate about reforming and paying for health care, Practical Wisdom
offers a useful reminder that in considering the relationships between
HMOs, insurance companies, the government, doctors, and patients the welfare of
the patients should take first place.

The book correctly emphasizes
that different institutions and professions create different workplace and
professional cultures. One who works in a law firm that is dominated by a moneymaking
culture is going to approach her job differently than if she were in a firm
that stressed client satisfaction. By pointing out such institutions as the
Mayo Clinic, the soul of which is the “cultural philosophy of doing the best
for the patient” (208), and contrasting it with medical care in McAllen, Texas,
where doctors emphasized profits more, the authors demonstrate that we as a
nation really have a choice in how we deliver health care. Not surprisingly,
while the Medicare spending per patient is relatively low in Rochester,
Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic operates, in McAllen it was the highest in the
USA.

In a society which
overemphasizes the importance of moneymaking, as well as rules and incentives
that often stifle initiative, spontaneity, creativity, and true learning, there
are some people who still manage to exercise practical wisdom. The authors cite
the example of custodians at a hospital who acquired their chief satisfaction
from contributing to the welfare of the hospital’s patients and their families
even though the custodians’ job description never mentioned such a task. At
times the exemplars of practical wisdom defy the moneymaking or rule-dominated
culture of their workplace and are, in the words of the authors, “canny
outlaws” pursuing as best they can their own wiser aims.

But individual efforts, as
valuable as they are, are not enough. System changers are also needed. And Practical
Wisdom again provides examples of such people—lawyers, doctors, educators,
community workers, and bankers—who are working to create institutions where
practical wisdom can flourish. In these new institutions, such wisdom is
promoted primarily by encouraging noble professional and workplace values and
allowing practitioners to exercise judgment as to how best carry them out.
Providing good feedback and mentoring is also important so that practitioners
best learn from their trial-and-error experiences.

In the final chapter, “Wisdom
and Happiness,” the authors state that “the wiser we are in what we do, the
happier we are.” (p. 270) They also quote Camus, who stated that “without work
all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” Like
President Kennedy, who
liked to say that “the Greeks defined happiness as the full use of your
powers along the lines of excellence,” the authors realize the great happiness
that can flow from fully exercising one’s powers for a good cause. And they are
correct that if more people were able to regard their work as a “calling” in
behalf of noble aims, there would be an increase in true happiness. But the
initiative to carve out a greater role for practical wisdom has to come not
only from “canny outlaws,” but also from “system changers.” By calling
attention to both groups and the good and wise actions they are already taking, Practical Wisdom can serve as an important stimulus to overcoming the
situation that the first sentence of the book describes—“We Americans are growing
increasingly disenchanted with the institutions on which we depend” (p.3).